Director Ridley Scott was intrigued by the Western Cape s quiver trees, or kokerboom
It was the extraordinary and eerie sight of a “tablecloth of cloud” coming over the mountains near Lourensford in the Western Cape that had renowned director Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner, The Martian, Prometheus and Gladiator) entranced.
He was in South Africa to
shoot the biggest budget TV series ever filmed in the country, HBO’s Raised by
Wolves.
Scott told Forbes magazine: “We found a range of mountains that were in your face for about a kilometre, and every morning this tablecloth of cloud would come in, it would just roll over them, and I went, ‘Oh my God!’ It was surreal, it was otherworldly, so half the work was done, just by the location.”
Littman Library of Jewish Civilization; 368 pages, $46.85)
Israel, the Jewish people, and Jewish thinkers have always been caught in the struggle between universalism and particularism. Theodore Herzl envisaged Jewish sovereignty as a way for Jews to become “normal”, allowing them to take a seat among the nations of the world. Yet many Zionists are more like Yeshayahu Leibovitz, who valued sovereignty simply because it freed him from subordination to goyim. Herzl wanted Jews to become part of the larger world; Leibovitz wanted to stay away. The Tanakh, too, suffers from this dialectic: Jews have a universal mission in the world “to be a blessing to all the nations of the earth” (Gen. 12:3), but also are “a people who dwells apart” (Numb. 23:9).